Ten days in Kyushu: four cities south by train, ending under an active volcano

The city's own shrine, founded in the eighth century, tucked behind the shopping streets. In the grounds stands one of the towering festival floats used in the Gion Yamakasa in July, kept on display all year, and it is worth the walk simply to see how big the things are that men run through the streets with at dawn.

Five minutes north, a temple founded by the monk Kukai on his return from China, holding a seated wooden Buddha almost eleven metres high. You can walk through a pitch-dark passage under the statue and come out the other side, which is the sort of thing that is either profound or alarming depending on your mood.

A sandbank between two river channels, packed with several thousand restaurants and bars, and after dark the pavement along the western bank fills with yatai: stalls with a canvas roof, eight stools and a chef cooking a metre away from you. Ramen, grilled chicken, gyoza, beer, whatever they do. Sit down, order, talk to whoever is next to you.

The stone bases, gates and part of the moat of the castle the Kuroda lords built in 1601, on a wooded hill in the middle of Maizuru Park. There is no keep left to go into, which turns out not to matter: you climb through the ruined tiers to a platform at the top with the whole city laid out and, in early April, a thousand cherry trees in flower underneath you.

Tonkotsu at a counter near the park, and say hard when they ask about the noodles. The second helping costs a hundred yen or so.

The castle's old outer moat, now a lake with an island chain of bridges across the middle and a two kilometre path around the edge. Locals run it, row on it and sit on it. On the north side there is a small walled Japanese garden, separately ticketed and worth the few hundred yen for twenty minutes of nothing but raked gravel and maples.

Out on the reclaimed bay front, a triangular mirrored tower with an observation floor at 123 metres. Go up an hour before sunset: the bay is west of you, the mountains are behind, and the city grid lights up while you are up there. There is a beach at the foot of it if you want to walk afterwards.

A fan-shaped artificial island, joined to the town by one guarded bridge, where the Dutch East India Company lived and traded through the whole of the closed period. The harbour was filled in around it long ago, but the warehouses, the factor's residence and the kitchens have been rebuilt on their original footings and furnished as they were. Ninety minutes, and the scale model near the entrance is the thing that makes it land.

Five minutes inland, four short streets meeting at a crossroads under red gates, and the oldest Chinatown in the country. Eat champon here, the thick noodle soup a Chinese cook invented in this quarter for students who could not afford to eat properly. In February the whole place is hung with lanterns for the new year and the city fills up.

A terraced park above the hypocentre with a bronze figure nearly ten metres high at the top of it, one hand pointing to the sky and one held out flat. Below, the hypocentre is marked by a black stone column in an open circle, with a surviving wall of the old cathedral moved and re-erected beside it. The fountains are memorials in their own right, because the dying asked for water.

A spiral of galleries beginning with a clock stopped at 11:02 and working forward through the morning itself, the physics, the injuries and the argument about nuclear weapons that has run ever since. Measured rather than angry, and very hard going through the middle. Two hours, and there is a cafe at the end you will want.

Urakami was the Catholic quarter, settled by the descendants of Christians who held the faith in secret for two centuries, and their cathedral stood five hundred metres from where the bomb went off. It was among the largest churches in Asia and it came down completely. The rebuilt one from the 1950s keeps the scorched fragments, including a fire-blackened stone Madonna, inside and in the grounds.

A hillside of Western houses from the 1860s onward, some built here and some moved here, laid out as an open-air museum with escalators up the slope and the best harbour view in the city. The centrepiece is the bungalow of Thomas Glover, the Scot who sold ships and guns to the men who brought down the shogunate, and it is the oldest Western-style building surviving in Japan.

Down the hill and inland, a Chinese temple built in 1629 by Nagasaki's Fujianese community with timber and craftsmen shipped from China, and one of the best surviving pieces of Ming architecture anywhere, China included. The vermilion gate stops you dead in an ordinary Japanese street. Quiet, cheap, and usually empty.

A 333 metre hill across the water, reached by tram and then a ropeway, with an observation deck on top. This is one of the views Japan ranks among its best three at night, and on a clear evening it earns it. If the cloud is down, do not bother going up.

Katō Kiyomasa built this in the early 1600s and built it to hold: the walls curve outward as they rise, a profile called musha-gaeshi, warrior repelling, and they defeated a besieging army in 1877. The keep burned down days before that siege began and the one standing now is a 1960s reconstruction. Two earthquakes in April 2016 brought down walls, turrets and a corner of the keep, which reopened in 2021 with the rest of the site still under a restoration that will run into the 2030s. Raised walkways take you over the works, which is its own kind of interesting.

The arcades north of the castle are the eating district. Kumamoto's specialities are raw horse, sliced thin like tuna, and lotus root stuffed with mustard miso and fried.

Miyamoto Musashi, duellist, painter and the most famous swordsman in Japanese history, retreated to this cave in the hills west of the city in 1643 and wrote The Book of Five Rings in it before dying two years later. The cave is small, wet and unimproved, which is the point. The path up passes several hundred weathered stone rakan figures, no two of them alike, which are worth as much as the cave.

Back towards town, the temple built for Katō Kiyomasa, the castle's builder, on a hillside directly level with the keep he raised. A long straight flight of steps climbs to his mausoleum, and the view back along the axis to the castle is deliberate. Steep, and worth doing anyway.

A strolling garden laid out by the Hosokawa lords from the 1630s around a spring-fed pond, and a miniature: the mounds and paths reproduce the stages of the old road between Kyoto and Edo, complete with a grass-covered Mount Fuji you can walk around in a minute. There is a teahouse on the water. It is regularly counted among the finest gardens in Japan and it takes an hour.

A museum about the handful of young men from this domain who brought down 250 years of shogunal rule and built a modern state instead. There is a free English audio guide, which you need, and a basement show with animated figures that is much better than that description suggests. Start here and the rest of the city makes sense.

The cemetery where Saigo and more than two thousand of the men who followed him into the 1877 rebellion are buried, in rank after rank of plain stone markers on a terraced slope. His own is in the middle and rarely without flowers on it. Fifteen minutes uphill from the museum, and one of the quietest places in the city.

The wooded hill behind the city, where the rebellion ended in a cave and Saigo took his own life. There is a path up through the trees and an observation platform at the top, and it holds the classic view of Kagoshima: the whole city below, the bay behind it, and the volcano filling the far side. Come for the last hour of daylight.

A live volcano three kilometres across the bay from a city of half a million, and one of the few in the world classified as exceptionally dangerous because of it. From the ferry terminal, a walking trail crosses the black rock left by the 1914 lava flow, and the Yunohira observation point higher up is the closest the public can get to the crater. Ash falls on the city often enough that Kagoshima issues residents with yellow bags to sweep it into.

There is very little on the island beyond the terminal area. Eat before you set off round it, and take water.

Back across the water, the covered arcades are where Kagoshima eats. Sweet potato shochu, poured over ice or cut with hot water, and black pork in some form.

The Shimazu family's villa and garden on the shore, laid out in 1658 to use the bay as its pond and the volcano across it as its borrowed hill, which is the most audacious piece of garden design in Japan. The house is open, there is a shrine to a pair of cats that the clan took to war as timekeepers, and next to it stand the stone workshops where the Shimazu built Japan's first Western-style industrial works in the 1850s, now on the UNESCO list.